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I lurk in an online community of journalist coders and some folks there are excited about PMTiles as cost-saving way to host your own custom-styled map tiles.
by bcks 3y ago
I lurk in an online community of journalist coders and some folks there are excited about PMTiles as cost-saving way to host your own custom-styled map tiles.
See, for instance, "How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions"
https://www.kschaul.com/post/2023/02/16/how-the-post-is-replacing-mapbox-with-open-source-solutions/ https://www.kschaul.com/post/2023/02/16/how-the-post-is-repl...
- loughnane 3y agoSounds like a neat community. Can you share where it is?
- bcks 3y agoSure thing, check out NICAR-L: https://www.ire.org/resources/listservs/ https://www.ire.org/resources/listservs/
- wolverine876 3y agoHow do the publications know this data is accurate?
- lmeyerov 3y agoMost of these piggyback on the OSM for the data tier, which $T companies work on. Afaict the discussion is more about compute on top - tile generation, interactive renderers, ... .
- wolverine876 3y ago$T companies aren't a source of truth. Much of journalism is reporting on their errors, including the intentional, reckless, and lazy kinds.
- ummonk 3y agoWhat would you suggest the publications use instead? Maps from billion dollar companies!
- wolverine876 3y agoI asked the question because it's an interesting question. In our world flooded in misinformation and cheap data, there's often little accurate, high-quality data.
- lmeyerov 3y agoI'm not sure what answer you are looking for / what alternative you are suggesting? OSM is the biggest community effort - NGO, volunteer, corporate, etc - to solve data quality in GIS. The participants do everything to improve quality from individuals walking around with GPS devices to companies launching low earth orbit satellites into space and self-driving cars in the ground with AI error detection. There is a more corporate and afaict anti-google effort more recently by tomtom and google competitors (Microsoft, meta) called Overture, which seems to be attempting a more closed and big corporate governed fork & ecosystem replacement of OSM, even if they phrase it as complementary. Your questioning of OSM-as-misinformation seems interesting in the comparative context of alternatives like Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Overture.
- wolverine876 3y ago> I'm not sure what answer you are looking for / what alternative you are suggesting? None of the above. People might just be curious and interested! Thanks for sharing all that. I didn't know much about the quality. Much crowd-sourced data has accuracy problems.
- resoluteteeth 3y agoGoogle maps also isn't always accurate. There's no source of maps that's guaranteed to be 100% accurate all the time.